Kudos to Kelly H. for exhibiting discerning taste in choosing an axolotl pencil case when the opportunity arose to redeem her student rewards card last Saturday!

Axolotls (large, neotenic salamanders native to lakes in central Mexico), by the way, are incredibly intriguing creatures. A popular exotic pet and a model organism for scientists studying congenital heart defects, limb regeneration, and the problem of transplant rejection, the axolotl may already be extinct in the wild but will likely endure, at least for the foreseeable future, in captivity.

Kelly’s pencil case is a reasonably on-the-nose likeness of a leucristine (ebony-eyed, rose-skinned) axolotl, one of the four color-variant mutant axolotl types in existence today, thanks to pet owners’ love of novelty, but not found within the original wild axolotl population, which are (or, perhaps, were) mottled olive-and-brown and speckled with gold.